Friday, January 15, 2010

Hey---I'm scratchng my head here---WTF?

So a recent article posted on the White House website claims that President Obama's "steady diplomacy" has given America a renewed moral authority.


So what's the recipe for their self-proclaimed success? Obama's clumsy and misguided attempt to close Gitmo. According to Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications (nice title), "By prohibiting torture and working to close the prison...we are denying Al-Queda a recruiting tool."

So lets analize this theory for a moment. If Gitmo is a great tool for the bad guys to recruit more bad guys, it means the place must be upsetting enough to turn men toward jihad. Translation: the very idea of it ruins their day. Gitmo represents treating terrorists like enemies, using every tool to extract information from them, and using that info to destroy their cause. So it's not waterboarding that pisses them off, but the fact that we're trying to beat them.

And this upsets them, much in the way Leno pisses off Conan, Nicole Ritchie irked Paris Hilton, or the troubling way in which Hulk Hogan undermined the Ultimate Warrior. But even more so, I think.

To me, it's both naïve and scary that the Administration thinks closing down Gitmo will reduce jihad - as if suddenly terrorists will stop terrorizing once a tool of war is removed. As John Bolton noted, America is, and will always be, the primary recruitment tool for all jihadists - Gitmo or no Gitmo. And if anything, closing Gitmo tells terrorists that their strategy worked - that these murderers can influence our decision-making - which only encourages them to step up their game.

How the Administration can call this Sally Field diplomacy a success is beyond me.

But a lot of things are beyond me. Which is why I own a sponge on a stick.

Friday, January 08, 2010

Terminology is moving back to reality

Excuse me .. but can someone tell me what happened to "man-caused disasters" and our "overseas contingency operation?" Those were the words that The ACORN Administration were going to use to refer to terror and the war on terror. Didn't last all that long, did it? Reality bites - and reality just took a huge hunk out of The Community Organizer's ass.

After much delay, Barack Obama finally made his speech on the crotch bomber and the failure of our intelligence community to stop him from boarding a plane to the United States. If you would like to read the report in its entirety, you can click here. After reading the report, it seems to boil down to this: We had the intelligence, but we got lazy. Or comfortable. Whatever adjective you want to use, the fact is that we had the information but no one put it together.

Actually ... I really think Obama has paid heed to his wakeup call. He's serious about this. Health care is one thing .. but negligently allowing a terrorist attack on our soil would do much more to doom his presidency than would the failure of ObamaCare. He's not yet at the point where he's willing to abandon a lot of the political correctness that goes hand-in-hand with our anti-terrorism efforts (at least not in the open) but hopefully that will come.

Are you upset that no heads rolled yesterday? Yeah .. me too. But in retrospect maybe it is a good idea to concentrate on the mission right now and deal with those not mission-capable down the road. Just bypass them for the time being. My guess is that Napolitano's influence as Homeland Security Director is quite a bit less than it was .. and that she's brushing up her resume as we speak.

You did hear what she said yesterday, didn't you? She said that she was really surprised by the dedication of these Islamic terrorists .. and then she indicated her surprise that they were using individual operatives in their efforts to kill non-believers. Come on now. That guy in the dump truck who cut you off this morning knew this ... and our Homeland Security Director is surprised?

This particular Obama appointment could cost American lives. She needs to go .. as soon as possible.